In Protesting Against Israel, Youth in Gaza Also Defy Hamas
"Shimon Peres doubts Israel can win Permanent war or Survive Annexation of West Bank"
By DIAA HADID and MAJD AL WAHEIDINOV. 6, 2015
Undercover Israeli security personnel detained a Palestinian protester during clashes in Bethlehem. A Palestinian woman was fatally shot by Israeli soldiers Friday in the southern West Bank. Credit Abdelrahman Younis/Reuters
El BUREIJ, Gaza Strip — The Palestinian youths huddled in the prohibited zone along the fence separating Gaza from Israel on Friday, cloaked by thick smoke pluming from flaming tires as they hurled rocks at Israeli jeeps. A tear gas canister came thudding down over their heads, and one teenager dashed over to pick it up and throw it into a puddle on a rainy afternoon.
This is the new normal in Gaza, where nearly every day since early October hundreds of youths have staged a demonstration of defiance against Israel by rushing the Gaza security fence en masse, and sometimes crossing it, to show solidarity with Palestinians under fire in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
“We want to send a message to the Israelis that we exist,” said Suheil, 24, who like most of the demonstrators requested that his family name be kept secret to avoid reprisal. “I feel like I’m in solidarity with our brothers in Jerusalem and the West Bank.”
But the demonstrations are also in defiance of the Islamist group Hamas,...
[...]
“We have swallowed so much suffering,” he said, sighing.
Report: US Donors Pump Millions Into Israeli Settlements
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DEC. 7, 2015, 11:22 A.M. E.S.T.
JERUSALEM — Private American donors have pumped more than $220 million into Jewish West Bank settlements in recent years through tax-deductible donations, effectively subsidizing a policy opposed by U.S. administrations for decades, according to an investigation published in an Israeli newspaper on Monday.
The Haaretz daily found that some 50 nonprofit organizations from across the U.S. were raising funds for settlements in the West Bank, an area the Palestinians [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/palestinians/index.html ] want as part of a future state, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Israel captured all three areas in the 1967 Mideast war.
The newspaper said the money's tax-deductible status means the U.S. government "is incentivizing and indirectly supporting the Israeli settlement movement," even though Washington opposes settlement construction and views it as an obstacle to peace with the Palestinians.
Peace talks collapsed last year and a wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence is entering its third month. Near-daily Palestinian attacks, mostly stabbings, have killed 19 Israelis, while more than 108 Palestinians have been killed. They include 73 people said by Israel to be attackers, with the remainder killed in clashes with Israeli troops.
In the latest violence, Israeli police said a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli outside a holy site in the West Bank city of Hebron on Monday, seriously wounding him before being shot and killed by officers at the scene. The site is holy to Jews, who refer to it as the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and to Muslims, who refer to it as the Ibrahimi Mosque.
Hebron, home to some 850 Israeli settlers who live in heavily guarded enclaves surrounded by tens of thousands of Palestinians, is a frequent flashpoint of violence. Many of the Palestinian attackers in the past months of bloodshed were from Hebron.
Israel accuses Palestinian political and religious leaders of inciting the violence. But the Palestinians say it is the result of nearly half a century of Israeli occupation and dwindling hope for gaining independence. They say the continued expansion of Jewish settlements on captured lands proves that Israel does not want peace. Israel says the issue of settlements should be dealt with in peace talks along with other thorny disputes.
The Palestinians and much of the international community view settlements as illegal and illegitimate. Nearly 600,000 Jewish settlers live in east Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Over the weekend, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned that continued settlement construction and other Israeli policies in the West Bank could endanger Israel's future as a Jewish, democratic state.
The Haaretz investigation found that some of the money sent by American donors has gone toward providing legal aid to extremist Jews through an Israeli group called Honenu.
The report also said some of the money was spent on paying the salary of settler leader Menachem Livni, an Israeli jailed in connection with his activities in a radical Jewish group that carried out attacks against Palestinians in the 1980s. The money has otherwise gone to acquiring buildings in the West Bank and east Jerusalem and improving the living conditions of Jewish settlers, the report said.
The report reviewed funds donated between 2009 and 2013, the latest year for which there is extensive data, the newspaper said.
It’s too late for a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine
January 7, 2016 6.15am EST
Author Padraig O'Malley John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation, University of Massachusetts Boston
Disclosure statement [inside]
[IMAGE can't rep...] US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter leaves Israel with business undone. July 21, 2015. Carolyn Kaster/REUTERS
Many obstacles stand in the way of a two-state solution to the conflict in Israel and Palestine.
At the moment, negotiations are a nonstarter for all parties.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has only a razor-thin majority in one of the most right-wing Knessets in Israeli history. President Barack Obama has tossed the ball to his successor. Recently, accounts have emerged of the US administration giving up on there ever being two states and beginning to focus on what a one-state solution looks like .. http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.684744 . And then there’s the ongoing violence in Jerusalem and the West Bank that has been called “a leaderless intifada .. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/world/middleeast/leaderless-palestinian-youth-inspired-by-social-media-drive-a-rise-in-violence.html .” This violence has cemented additional layers of distrust of Palestinians to the ones Jewish Israelis already harbor. The hatred is calcifying.
During the five years I spent researching the conflict in Israel and Palestine for my recent book, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine .. http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/303416/the-two-state-delusion-by-padraig-omalley/9780670025053/ , it became increasingly clear that while talks over the past 25 years have focused on borders, settlements, Jerusalem and the right of return of refugees, demographic changes may have made the idea of a two-state solution obsolete even before such a solution could be worked out.
As I report in my book, other demographic changes that have received little attention but may be of far more consequence are taking place within Israel’s Jewish population.
Population shifts
The birth rates of Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, and of Palestinian-Israelis exceed those of Orthodox and secular Jews.
Twenty years ago, 60 percent of Jewish Israeli children attended secular schools. Today, that number is 40 percent, and the trend shows no sign of leveling off.
With more religious education, it’s perhaps not surprising that Israel’s best demographers foresee an increasingly religious Israel. The Haredim will account .. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/150670#.U2vbVvldWhE .. for 20 percent of the population by 2030, and between 27 percent and 41 percent in 2059, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
Allied to the increasing propensity to religiosity among Israeli Jews are trends in the composition of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a change that raises questions about the reliability of the army.
The IDF is increasingly a religious army, recruited from the settler community in the West Bank.
The rate of settler recruitment to combat units in the IDF is 80 percent higher than the rest of country. In 2011, two-thirds of draftees from West Bank settlements served in combat units, compared with 40 percent from the rest of country.
In some combat units, Orthodox men now make up 50 percent of new combat officers – four times their share in the population. There are now entire units of religious combat soldiers, many of them based in West Bank settlements where an implicit alliance between some settler communities and the IDF are commonplace .. http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/the-ultra-orthodox-are-changing-the-face-of-the-idf-1.396302 . These religious combat soldiers answer to hard-line rabbis who call for the establishment of a greater Israel that includes the West Bank. These changes are paralleled by a decline in the number of combat soldiers and officers coming from secular families.
Putting an agreement into practice
[IMAGE]Palestinian boys clear out after the IDF demolished their shanty near Jerusalem, January 6, 2016. Mohamad Torokman/REUTERS
The role of these rabbis in controlling the army raises the question: if a two-state agreement miraculously emerged out of the current rampant violence, what are the realities of putting it into place?
There are no firm estimates of the number of armed settlers who are likely to resist evacuation. However, between 30 percent and 40 percent of West Bank settlers can be considered .. http://www.pij.org/pijpapers/settlements_pijpaper.pdf .. “ideological.”
“Ideological settlers,” according to Oded Eran, who served as head of Israel’s negotiating team from 1999 to 2000, “are the toughest.“ In an interview for my book, Eran pointed out that this group tends to live deeper inside the West Bank. And, for ideological reasons, a small number may take the law into their own hands.
[ as the Bundy brats do ]
A call for evacuation could lead to violence between the settlers and the IDF and violence between settlers and the Palestinian population. “This is going to be a long, painful and expensive operation,” Eran said.
Harel noted the potential for mass disobedience in the face of such orders was making many Israeli politicians and senior officers have second thoughts before ordering soldiers to take actions against settlers. In the succeeding five years, with the continuing disproportionate influx of settler recruits to the IDF, the question is more pertinent.
Would an Israeli prime minister risk giving such an order, unsure whether it would be implemented? Such an order could tear apart the cohesiveness of Israel, already rife with multiple fault lines.
Right now, the weight of uncertainties surrounding a two-state solution seems to outweigh the benefits.
The future? There will be no mitigation of present trends. With every passing year using the IDF to evacuate settlers will become more problematic, and evacuation less likely.
GR, you ignore Lieberman who is secularist. The point tinner made is more on the mark than your insistence that my ""it suggests a theocratic (Perry,Palin, puffstash) type effort is not real popular much anywhere .. "" was so off the mark for you to simply dump on it .. the theocracy, or not, battle in Israel is in fact much as the one in the USA .. the articles below i see as supporting that position .. We must stop Israel from becoming a theocracy http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=97933048
Destroying the Commons How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta .. speck .. The record of the terrorist list is of some interest. For example, in 1988 the Reagan administration declared Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress to be one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups,” so that Reagan could continue his support for the Apartheid regime and its murderous depredations in South Africa and in neighboring countries, as part of his “war on terror.” Twenty years later Mandela was finally removed [ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7484517.stm ] from the terrorist list, and can now travel to the U.S. without a special waiver.
Another interesting case is Saddam Hussein, removed from the terrorist list in 1982 so that the Reagan administration could provide him with support for his invasion of Iran. The support continued well after the war ended. In 1989, President Bush I even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the U.S. for advanced training in weapons production -- more information that must be kept from the eyes of the “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.”
One of the ugliest examples of the use of the terrorist list has to do with the tortured people of Somalia. Immediately after September 11th, the United States closed down the Somali charitable network Al-Barakaat on grounds that it was financing terror. This achievement was hailed one of the great successes of the "war on terror." In contrast, Washington's withdrawal of its charges as without merit a year later aroused little notice. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=77869081
Smotrich at Knesset: Ben-Gurion should have ‘finished the job,’ thrown out Arabs
"Shimon Peres doubts Israel can win Permanent war or Survive Annexation of West Bank "SPIEGEL Interview with Israeli President Shimon Peres""
Joint List MK Aida Touma-Sliman decries the ‘fascist filth’ to which she says Arabs are regularly subjected
By Amy Spiro 13 October 2021, 6:58 pm
Religious Zionism party head Bezalel Smotrich addresses a Knesset plenum session on the state budget on September 2, 2021. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
Speaking from the Knesset plenum on Wednesday, far-right Religious Zionism MK Bezalel Smotrich said David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, should have “finished the job” and kicked all Arabs out of the country when it was founded.
During comments on a contentious immigration bill proposed by the opposition, Smotrich shouted about the need to maintain Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state. “Yes, Jewish, with a Jewish majority,” he called out. “With security for the citizens of the State of Israel.”
Smotrich was heckled by several Arab Knesset members and retorted: “I’m not speaking to you, anti-Zionists, terror supporters, enemies,” he said. “You’re here by mistake, it’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948.”
In response, Joint List MK Aida Touma-Sliman slammed Smotrich’s “fascist” remarks.
“We are subject to this fascist filth almost every day in the Knesset,” said Touma-Sliman. “But don’t think about us. Think about how every Arab citizen feels when a statement like this is made casually in the parliament. Think about how every young [Arab] feels when the right-wing threatens a second Nakba,” she added, using the Arabic word for disaster, which Palestinians use to refer to the founding of the State of Israel.
Far-right activists sometimes use the concept of a “second Nakba” as a threat to Arabs.
Smotrich was reacting with outrage to the failure of a bill brought by his fellow party MK Simcha Rotman aimed at changing the Law of Return and revising Israeli immigration policies.
[INSERT: brooklyn13, Seems to me it is incorrect for you to say -- "I don't agree with this bill, but your maps are deceiving. There was never a Palestine previously... [...] conix, So you bring back the age-old, anti-free debate idea that you cannot be critical of Zionist (non-democratic) Israel without being antisemitic. It's a cheap effort to distract from the antidemocratic efforts of the clearly and fairly seen fascist tendencies of Trump's GOP. Some repeated on that at bottom. [...] Israel’s 1952 Citizenship Law at its outset notes that the state grants citizenship via four routes: (1) “return,” (2) “residence in Israel,” (3) birth, and (4) naturalization.[572] Israel reserves the first path, “return,” exclusively for Jews. This path grows out of the 1950 “Law of Return,” which guarantees Jewish citizens of other countries the right to settle in Israel.[573] The Citizenship Law states that Jews already living in Israel at the time gain citizenship via this path, as opposed to the “residence in Israel” one. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170035250]
The bill failed 45-57, with coalition MKs, including Yamina, voting against the law. The Religious Zionism MK said he had no expectation for the support of the Joint List MKs, who he labeled enemies, but was horrified to see right-wing members of Knesset oppose the bill.
The opposition, including Smotrich and his party, had previously voted down legislation proposed by the coalition to limit immigration.
This is a lengthy read and has references that are lengthier still... but it's good. https://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Famous-Zionist-Quotes/Story638.html --- From the beginning, Zionists advocated a "Jewish State" not just in Palestine, but also in Jordan, southern Lebanon, and the Golan Heights as well. In 1918 Ben-Gurion described the future "Jewish state's" frontiers in details as follows: P - "to the north, the Litani river [in southern Lebanon], to the northeast, the Wadi 'Owja, twenty miles south of Damascus; the southern border will be mobile and pushed into Sinai at least up to Wadi al-'Arish; and to the east, the Syrian Desert, including the furthest edge of Transjordan" (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 87) Click here to view the "Greater Israel" map that was submitted by the Zionists to the peace conference after WWI. --- https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=157715719
.. and in reply .. Greater Israel, exactly. Every time i think of the Lebanon troubles now i think of that Zionist ultimate goal. One of a few posts on it: P - The Yesha Council is the organization that supports the West Bank settlers so it's not surprising it's chairman, David Elhayani, would be against any interruption of further occupation of what the international community fairly sees as occupied land. P - "‘He misled everyone!’ Israeli leader fumes at Jared Kushner as Trump’s ‘peace plan’ spirals down the drain" [...] Trump Releases Mideast Peace Plan That Strongly Favors Israel https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=157716687
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